WTF?! NO floppy in Lucid or in Meerkat!

[Liam Proven]

On 24 September 2010 16:02, ms <devicerandom at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't understand how could you insist that they maintain something
> that they have no hardware to test on.
>
> It's sad, I understand, but it's also normal. Technologies come and go.
> Floppy is a dead technology since years and years.

Floppies are not extinct, are still in common use, and for quite a
number of relatively modern machines that cannot boot from USB are
still the most commonly-available easiest and cheapest boot media. To
burn a CD for one use, such as re-Flashing a BIOS, and then throw it
away is appalling environmental irresponsibility.

I expect testing on desktop machines and I expect support for fairly
recent legacy hardware. PS/2 ports, parallel & serial ports, analogue
VGA ports & monitors, CDs as opposed to DVDs, the ISA bus, the
parallel PCI buses, these are all "legacy" technology but still in
use. I have a live P4 server with Cirrus graphics on an electronic PCI
interface (physically, it's on the motherboard); I still expect such
things to work.

Also, it pays to be aware of the position of Linux and Ubuntu in the
real world. It is a tiny minority OS in a world dominated by Windows
and one commercial UNIX. One of the main uses for Linux for many
people is to bring old PC hardware back to life, for which no licence
is available for a commercial OS, or where it would be too expensive
or modern commercial OSs too heavyweight. This is an important niche
and should not be neglected.

>> And for all those who still spout the line that Ubuntu will run on all
>> hardware -- get real! It's crap!
>
> It has always been crap, if you take this literally. Ubuntu won't run on
> my 30-years old VIC20, nor on a PDP10, or on a 640K-ram 8086.

No, but I *do* expect it to work on kit that meets the minimum
requirements and kit that is (say) ten to 12 years old if it was of
good specification at the time.

A 64MB Pentium 1 from 1995, no. A 1GB P3 from 1998 or 1999, yes.

I am still using live machines less than a decade old that can't boot from USB.

-- 
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